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July 18, 2012

Aargh, so excited about a book but then I realized I don't like the author's other work

There aren't many (any?) American mystery/thrillers with Asian-American main characters, so I was kind of excited to see that Final Price by J. Gregory Smith is available for borrowing for free through Amazon Prime; it's about detective Paul Chang.

But when I looked it up on my Kindle Fire, a bunch of books by Mr. Smith showed up, and I realized I'd read one of them earlier. Here's the review I wrote on Amazon for A Noble Cause:

"A Noble Cause" started off with promise: Mark Noble has set up an elaborate plan to propose to his girlfriend Vanessa while on a Caribbean vacation, but she never comes back from the town shopping trip. . . . From there, Mark's life gets worse and worse. The police don't take her disappearance seriously, his father -- a famous doctor to the stars -- dies in a suspicious fire, and Mark has to escape from bad guys bent on kidnapping him. During this early set up, author Greg Smith does a decent job in trying to relate Mark's emotions and confusion and desperation.

Unfortunately, after that, the novel starts to sink from the flatness of characterization given to virtually every other character, other than a former cop turned private detective; its strong resemblance to Dean Koontz's "False Memory," a novel so disappointing that it basically ended my interest in Koontz novels (seriously); and worse yet, a plot point that evoked long-buried memories of the worst episode ever of the original Star Trek series, "Spock's Brain."

This wasn't a bad novel, but it wasn't something that I couldn't put down either. As far as mind control novels do, the standard is probably still Richard Condon's "The Manchurian Candidate," which has nothing to fear from "A Noble Cause."

Yikes, I forgot about "Spock's Brain," but that review brought back bad memories. I don't know, I may still give Final Price a chance, but I'm not all that excited about it.